(FORTUNE Magazine) – "This used to be an easy job. But now it's tough out there," said the harried-looking guy next to me on the Boston-New York shuttle two weeks ago, between swigs from a travel-sized bottle of Maalox. A campus recruiter for a New York-based FORTUNE 500 company, he had spent a tense week scouring Beantown colleges for topnotch new hires--only to find that "our competitors skimmed off the cream last fall, and even the also-rans have three other offers." Anybody who has tried to do much hiring lately can sympathize. With U.S. unemployment at 4.2%, its lowest point in nearly 30 years, about 60% of 3,800 companies just surveyed by Management Recruiters International are resorting to hefty hiring bonuses to swipe middle managers from other companies. And once you've got the people you need, your Maalox moments aren't over: You've still got to figure out how to keep them.

Enter consultants Jim Harris and Joan Brannick, with some tales that could help. For Finding & Keeping Great Employees (Amacom, $24.95), the authors collected dozens of short, to-the-point case studies from companies--large and small--that have mastered the art of getting and retaining the right workers. There is at least one terrific--and frequently counterintuitive--idea on every one of its 208 pages.

Want to keep people from leaving to start their own businesses? Try something like Lockheed's "employee spinoff" program: Help would-be entrepreneurs spread their wings for two years--at the end of which, you either get them back, sadder but wiser, or you get dibs on equity investments and licensing agreements with the new enterprise. Need to attract skilled IT workers, but your headquarters is in a crummy city? Move the mountain to Mohammed, as FedEx did. Rather than try fruitlessly to sell IT recruits on the wonders of Memphis, FedEx shifted jobs to Dallas, Colorado Springs, and Orlando--and gave candidates their choice of location.

Cash-strapped startups, take heart: Not all the best methods require vast sums of capital. At tiny Bluestone Software in Mount Laurel, N.J., technical recruiter Amy Naples haunts a local bookstore, chatting up people who are seriously browsing the Java and C++ programming manuals. (She also admits to tucking her card into books that her best prospects are likely to read sometime.) Says Naples: "There is not a person I meet whom I do not ask whether they know another skilled technical person who is looking for a job." Talk may be cheap, but it works. So does this book. --Anne Fisher